The GQA: Nick Offerman

The Parks and Recreation star on how to be a man, how to love a woman, and why he'll never tweet again

You might be surprised to learn that Nick Offerman—who plays iconic manly-man Ron Swanson on the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation—has a giggle that can only be described as girlish. It is at once disconcerting (this is a guy who wields a chainsaw like it’s a third arm) and endearing. I got a load of the giggle over breakfast in New York. Not long after allowing his pubic hair to be shaved into the shape of a eagle for GQ’s July issue, he and the cast of Parks had come east to receive a Peabody Award. Offerman was wearing a tie-dye T-shirt, jeans, and the bushy beard he favors when his show is on hiatus. Despite a hangover, he was unfailingly polite; the waitress got a please and thank you every time she dropped by. He is also the poster boy for how to treat a woman. Take note, guys: This a man who never misses an opportunity to wax rhapsodic about his wife of twelve years, actress Megan Mullally (who plays Ron Swanson’s sex-crazed librarian ex, Tammy Two). Indeed, Offerman has an admirable affection for old school good manners and a clear code of behavior—rules that, we have come to believe, every man should live by.

GQ: What were you up to last night?

Nick Offerman: A contingent of us—[Parks creator] Mike Schur, Amy [Poehler], Adam Scott and myself went to the season finale of Saturday Night Live. It was really something. I’ve never seen Mick Jagger perform. The Foo Fighters played live karaoke at the after-party. I am always so happy to be at SNL. I still feel like a kid when I’m there, like I can’t believe I’m watching them make the show. I had known Amy back in Chicago in our early twenties, and so eventually when I started going to SNL, it was as if my childhood friend was getting me into the White House. Steve Martin was there last night, and we’ve met, and I stood next to him for a while.

GQ: You stood next to him? You say that like you didn’t talk to him.

Nick Offerman: I’ve learned through experience that to trouble celebrities with my handshake doesn’t do anybody any good. I thought, If Martin doesn’t talk to me, I’m not going to add to his evening of, Hello, nice to meet you. So I did not say anything.

GQ: I have to interrupt for a moment: One thing I’ve come to appreciate about you is that you don’t often use contractions.

Nick Offerman: Oh. That’s a compliment I don’t hear very much. Or, I should say, that’s a compliment I do not hear very often. [giggles]

GQ: I’m happy to see that Parks was renewed, which wasn’t a certainty.

Nick Offerman: It was a strange time for us. The Thursday and Friday before the upfronts [the May event where the networks reveal their fall shows to advertisers], we still weren’t hearing if the show had been picked up, and we were nervous. Then suddenly there were rumors, and for the first time NBC didn’t invite the cast to the upfronts. We were, like, what’s going on!

GQ: And then that whole thing with NBC firing Community creator Dan Harmon.

Nick Offerman: It was crazy, but not surprising. Dan has been notoriously difficult with NBC. And then he had that really public Chevy Chase feud. I think Dan is brilliant, but we all kind of hung our heads and thought, That’s no way for a boss to behave.

GQ: You strike me as a guy who has a powerful code for behaving properly. Are there some rules you could share with GQ’s readers?

Nick Offerman: I would say, first of all, be prepared. I can’t say enough about that. Right now I’m traveling in New York City, but I still have my Swiss army knife on me. I grew up among farmers in Illinois and so you always have to have the tools you might need in the eventuality of a flat tire or a broken window. In the traditional role of man, it falls to you to keep the weather out and fish in the boat. Two: Be polite. Good manners have gotten me as far as anything else in this business. The first film I did, Chain Reaction, was with Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman. I had some really nice scenes as Keanu’s building super, which were then completely cut from the film [giggles]. Anyway, at the end of my day on set, I hung up my costume in the trailer, and the wardrobe assistant came to pick it up. I said something involving please and thank you. She stopped, put her hands on her heart, and said, "Can I just say thank you so much for treating me like that, and for hanging up your clothes?" I said, "Are you kidding me?" And it quickly became clear, as I continued working, that having manners was equivalent to a superpower in the business.

GQ: Would you say it’s getting worse?

Nick Offerman: Actually, in the twenty years that I’ve been working, I’ve seen it start to get better. On Parks, for example, there’s kind of a No Assholes rule. You cannot get away with diva behavior on our set. It certainly does still exist in the industry, but it’s not as prevalent. You can see it in the cars. When young people come into money in Hollywood these days, they no longer buy the muscle car, they buy the Prius. It’s amazing to me, the parking row at my show—all these twenty-six-year-old wunderkinds who went to Harvard or Brown and, boom, in three years they’re on the writing staff of Parks, And literally it’s a fleet of Priuses on the lot. That gives me a lot of hope that we’re evolving.

GQ: What do you drive?

Nick Offerman: A little Audi wagon. I would like nothing more than to get a ’68 Chevelle convertible. That’s my dream—to be Matthew McConaughey’s character in Dazed and Confused.

GQ: I’m sure you could get one.

Nick Offerman: Oh, yeah, I could. But I can’t in good conscience. I know too much about the world, sadly. For years I drove a big Ford F250 pickup. That was my ride because two-thirds of my work was wood work, and I’m always driving up to Northern California, where I harvest salvaged trees.

GQ: Just for readers who don’t know, you have a thriving custom wood shop in Los Angeles, where you build tables and canoes, among other things. Your website, by the way, is beautifully designed.

Nick Offerman: Thank you. And, yes, when my career was primarily woodwork, I needed a big truck. But four or five years ago, when acting work started to take over, there was a shift. One particular day on the Fox lot, a woman shouted at me from across the parking garage—something about what my penis size must be because of the truck I drove [giggles]. I was pretty gob smacked. God, lady! I mean, I get it, I agree with you. But I actually haul trees that I cut with my chainsaw, ma’am. And my genitals are perfectly adequate. Bastard. But that was around the time when I realized it was ludicrous to be commuting in this big diesel truck. And even the Audi posed a crisis of conscience—whether to get the A4 or the A6, which is more sporty and beefed up. But I couldn’t pull that trigger. A modern German-made station wagon is so incredible and zippy—it would just be the McDonalds consumer in me that would bump it up to six or eight cylinders.

GQ: Any other rules before we go on?

Nick Offerman: Yes. Learn to do something with your hands. Ladies and men alike find handcrafting to be really sexy. When I met Megan, I was building a set for the play we were doing, and she saw me with my tool belt for a month. I would be a fool to think that didn’t have some effect on her hormonal decision.

GQ: I noticed that you sell coffins on your site. Has anyone bought one?

Nick Offerman: Not yet. Being a man of the theater and a hedonist, I find the idea of building coffins very romantic. It’s just another version of a wooden vessel that carries us through this world—whether it’s a bowl or a canoe or a coffin. But the only coffin, so far, is only this big [he holds his hands about two feet apart]. I lived with this friend in college and Chicago, when we used to enjoy a lot of marijuana. He has a macabre sense of humor, so it was only right that I would make a coffin-shaped stash box.

GQ: Given your very DIY sensibility, I was surprised to see that you had a Twitter account.

Nick Offerman: It was a brief, unfortunate interlude. Megan and I happily eschew all social networking. I got involved because of a movie I produced and starred in, Somebody Up There Likes Me. The filmmaker, Bob Byington, is an old friend and each of his films is his whole life. And he kept suggesting that I ask some of my friends, who have millions of followers, to tweet about our movie, particularly when the trailer went online. I was in the middle of sending Conan O’Brien an e-mail asking him to tweet about it, and thankfully I caught myself and said, Wait a second. That’s a real asshole move. Conan’s gone to the trouble—and a handful of other friends—have gone to the trouble of amassing all these followers, and applying themselves to this service that is free. Grab yourself by your bootstraps and do it yourself, jerk. I also had this humorist tour coming up, and I knew that [Parks co-star] Aziz Ansari does really well communicating with his fan base about his comedy shows.

GQ: What was his advice for successful Tweeting?

Nick Offerman: Aziz told me, don’t follow more than ten or twelve people. He said he follows over three hundred and it consumes his life. So I picked just a handful of people that I knew and liked, and was just immediately struck by—it was like signing up for cable for the first time and thinking you need to Tivo seventeen channels, and then you start watching the channels and you’re like, There’s no need to watch any of them! It was frankly horrifying.

GQ: So what made you stop?

Nick Offerman: A couple of weeks into Tweeting, I was down in New Orleans for a couple of weeks, working on a film with Holly Hunter. We got into some long philosophical conversations about how these social networks are degrading our society and civilization. I immediately started putting it into my humorist show. One of my tips is get a hobby, and part of that section is talking about putting your phone down and doing something with your hands, so that at the end of two hours you have a tangible result to your time. You’ve still been distracting yourself, by knitting or cooking or playing music, but you’ve created something instead of played Words with Friends for two hours. Of course smartphones are brilliant inventions, but the nefarious thing about Twitter and other social media is that it starts to fill all the gaps in your day. I quickly become an addict. If there was a pause in a conversation, I didn’t think twice about seeing what Rob Delaney had to say. It was on a van ride home from the movie set that everything came together. I realized I had to get off Twitter. It just struck me that I couldn’t stop everyone else from doing it, but I could certainly stop myself. Who is it that said, "Be the change you want to see in the world?" Was it John Lennon? It was probably Yoko [giggles]. If John said it, it was probably Yoko who said it first.

GQ: Speaking of great partnerships: One of the best photos I’ve seen of you and Megan was in New York magazine a few years ago. The two of you posed nude—it was very Rubenesque.

Nick Offerman: That was completely Megan’s idea. So many of the good things in my life are attributable to Megan—she’s the brains of the outfit. And I’m really good at carrying luggage. I make tables, and she puts illustrious people around them.

GQ: Seems like she’s been a mentor since you met.

Nick Offerman: Megan is eleven years older, and fascinatingly—to us anyway—she got Will Grace at thirty-eight or nine, which is the exact same age I got Parks. I was there for the last six years of Will Grace, and it was like this incredible PHD program by proxy. By being in the golden position of being her spouse, I had the freedom to walk around and glean everything I wanted to. And one of the things that always occurred to me is that it’s easier to win the New Jersey Powerball than to put together a successful sitcom. And there was nothing I wanted to do more than to make people laugh like Megan did, and I just thought it would never happen for me. So now, coming home from work—having just eaten two pounds of beef for a paycheck—it astonishes me and makes me really grateful that I’ve lucked into Parks. Watching Megan go through all of these career steps and being her support system was unwittingly an incredible education in handling it myself.

GQ: Is it true that you hooked up at a Glen Campbell concert? Are you fans?

Nick Offerman: I mean, we’re Americans so, like oxygen and food, we love Glen Campbell. When we started dating in 2000, we went to the Hollywood Bowl for the Fourth of July to see him. The second to last song was "Rhinestone Cowboy," and there were fireworks, both literal and figurative. That was the first time Megan invited me to be her boyfriend. I mean, I had been asking [giggles]. I’d been at the door for a while, and she opened up and let me in to Glen Campbell. So he holds a special place in our hearts.

GQ: You’ve been with Megan for twelve years, and you’re still a little starry-eyed when you talk about her. You seem to love her as much as you did when you met. I think I speak for all women when I say, Tell us how you do that?

Nick Offerman: Again, I have to give Megan a lot of credit. I was still a young actor when we started dating. She had to point out that if I wanted to commit to this, I’d have to step up to the plate and we right away made some rules. We put our relationship above everything else, including acting jobs, and that’s what—I think what can erode a relationship is allowing other things to take precedence over it. We have a rule that we will never do a job that will keep us apart for more than two weeks. But I also grew up in this incredibly farm family in Illinois, with an incredible salt-of-the-earth set of parents, so I had an amazing example for me, of a loving marriage. I feel incredibly lucky that Megan and I are still like newlyweds. But I think a lot of it has to do with our sense of fidelity. I have managed to land an absolute goddess of beauty and talent, but still she is a human being and I am a human being. It’s not that different from any relationship where you live with someone: At some point they’re going to get on your tits and you need to rise above it. I think I can boil down my rule for a happy relationship to one phrase: Swallow yourself. That is something I’m thankful to have learned: Whenever I have a stubborn position on something, I take a deep breath and swallow myself. When let go of my stubbornness, the argument goes away really quickly. Hang on to your ego. I just coined that phrase. You’re welcome to it.

GQ: Aside from Campbell, do you have a soundtrack for getting down with your lady?

Nick Offerman: My ultimate soundtrack for lovemaking is Peter Gabriel’s Passion: Music for The Last Temptation of Christ.

GQ: That’s certainly an unusual choice!

Nick Offerman: Well, if you listen to it—and it depends on your personal timing and cycles of climax but it has some very languid, you know, drawn-out tracks for foreplay, culminating in some blood-curdling screams with driving tribal drums [giggles]. Megan and I share taste in music, and we consider musicians like Tom Waits and Randy Newman and Patty Griffin to be the most romantic musicians. Not necessarily the most beautiful music, but, for our money, the most romantic because it’s authentic and from real life experience. When I first got turned on to Tom Waits, I was trying to get my dad to come around, and I played him one of Tom’s most moving songs, his cover of "Somewhere" from West Side Story. My dad said, It’s a pretty song, but the guy sounds like he’s being run over by a dump truck. And I said, "Well, that’s the point, Dad." This guy whose voice evokes having been through a lot of shit is singing that there is even a place and time for him.

GQ: I asked a writer who interviewed you what I should know about Nick Offerman that I don’t know from the countless articles and interviews. She said that you’re a big fan of American pastoral poetry.

Nick Offerman: [sounding shocked] She did?

GQ: Yes. She said that you are a fan of American pastoral poetry, for one thing, and that you tear up when you look at photos of your two dogs.

Nick Offerman: Yes, that is true. Especially when I’m far away from them. But that sounds much too high-falutin’ to say I am a fan of American pastoral poetry. Uh, I love to read, certainly. And my favorite writer is Wendell Berry. But, um, I am certainly no expert in literary genres, beyond plays.

GQ: What books are you reading now?

Nick Offerman: I’m halfway through Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace—a writer who escaped my notice until a few years ago, when posthumously his final novel, The Pale King, came out. Mike Schur did his thesis on Wallace and had been in touch with him, and was absolutely religious about his writing. And Mike had organized a reading in Los Angeles—excerpts from The Pale King. It was Henry Rollins, Adam Scott, myself, and a couple of other actors. That was my introduction to Wallace’s writing. And to continue in my fealty to Mike Schur, I decided to devour the massive feast that is Infinite Jest. But I am constantly reading Wendell Berry—that’s sort of my bible.

GQ: What drew you to Berry?

Nick Offerman: I was working at Steppenwolf doing Buried Child, and this great actor named Leo Burmester befriended me, and on closing night gave me a collection of Berry’s short stories. I had no idea what a profound influence he was handing me. And I ended up getting in touch with Berry, trying to get permission to adapt some of his work. And he, so far, has refused. He says that he doesn’t want to see anybody’s adaptation because all of his fiction is of a piece—all of his stories and novels continue to flesh out his fictional, rural town of Port William, which reminds me of the farm town where I grew up in. So I wrote him back and said, "I’m annoyed because I have to respect your wishes even more, but I’m so disappointed. And I said, You’re getting up there in years, so if at some point you feel okay about it, I’ll be ready." I mean, I’d really love—if he would ever give me the green light, I feel like his body work would make a great TV series, a la Little House on the Prairie. We’ll see what happens. I’m new to the world of getting to do things that I want to.

GQ: Didn’t you write an episode of Parks and Recreation this past season?

Nick Offerman: It was called "Lucky." It’s the one where Leslie gets a hotshot interview with a guy in Indianapolis, played by Sean Hayes. And Andy finishes his college class and gets his oral exam, and we all go out with his teacher. It’s a little bit of a triangle with Rob Lowe, herself, and my character.

GQ: Was that the first script you’ve written?

Nick Offerman: It is. It’s really the first thing I’ve written period. I love writing. I write short, funny things all the time.

GQ: Including what you wrote for the July issue of GQ.

Nick Offerman: Yes. For years, Megan—god love her—I would leave her a Post-it in the morning on the way to work. And I would get home at night and she would be holding the Post-it and saying, Honey, you really need to be writing. I would say, "Honey, it’s a Post-it." Two phrases [giggles]. And she’d say, "Yeah, but you’ve got the goods." So Mike Schur took a big chance, and I was very tickled to be able to do so.

GQ: What was it like writing for your own character?

Nick Offerman: It was really fun, I mean, I think what gave him the confidence to have me do it is that, from the get-go, I’ve been writing for my character. We all sort of do, to some extent. I will also pitch line for other characters. We’re all throwing out ideas for the stories.

GQ: Does that happen on set or in the writer’s room?

Nick Offerman: Mostly it happens on set, but I learned quickly that, in my down time, if I go sit in the writer’s room—it’s really fun and educational to sit among twelve geniuses as they try to make each other laugh.

GQ: Once, for a story, I got to sit in The Simpsons writing room. There were about a dozen guys, and they would tell jokes, and no one would actually laugh. They’d go, "Yeah, that’s funny." No one laughed once, and I’m sitting in the corner laughing my ass off. Is that the way it is in the Parks room?

Nick Offerman: No. We’re like children sucking on helium. I wonder if maybe the Simpsons writers had been doing it so long...

GQ: Yeah, they’re like professors of comedy.

Nick Offerman: They are as impressed with each other’s jokes as the Harlem Globetrotters would be with each other’s layups. Like, Eh, okay. Seven spins and a flip? All right, not bad. I mean, we have Mike Scully, one of the old guard from The Simpsons, working on our show. And he has that sly, quiet way about him in the room, where he’ll float out a joke. And then there’s all these young people throwing a lot more out at the wall to see if it will stick, and Scully’s material just rides through. Being in the room while my own script was being broken and rewritten and polished was some of the most fun I’ve ever had. These late-night sessions where things just devolved into outright silliness. I haven’t giggled so much since I was under the influence of something in college.

GQ: What’s your favorite Ron Swanson line?

Nick Offerman: Oh, gosh. It’s a hard question because, regardless of who penned them, for me it’s all of a piece. Actually, my favorite answer to that question is silence. I think one of the things we love to see Ron succeed at is not having to say anything while speaking volumes. Mike and l love Ron’s sensibility when he takes an unlikely position and states it very matter-of-factly, as if people are idiots for thinking otherwise.

GQ: The unexpected development in the second season, when Ron becomes Leslie’s ally, was one of the show’s sweetest developments. It’s one of the reasons, in my opinion, that Parks and Recreation went from good to great—which is all part of the bigger picture of making the show less about Leslie and more about the ensemble. It sounds like you’re saying that the show is the same behind the scenes—very collaborative.

Nick Offerman: I had dinner with Mike last night, and we were talking about story ideas for next year, and about the season we just created. I learned in my early years in the theater that I would never become the guy on top. I’ll never create a show; I don’t have a brain expansive enough to see the whole picture, in a way that would behoove anyone. But I learned that I was very good at serving the general. And I love to soldier for someone who can see that vision, like Mike. It’s so rewarding for me to have found this place where he lays out the landscaping, and I’m in charge of shoveling. He just tells me where to dig and I know he’s going to be very pleased with my hole. [giggles]

GQ: I get a little envious watching the show because who doesn’t want to be part of that group? Those characters clearly love each other. Not many people can say that about their co-workers.

Nick Offerman: So many of the sets I’ve been on are operated, to some extent, under a reign of fear. Quite frequently the kind of mentality, or the kind of personality that can create a wonderful show is also riddled with some kind of insecurity and neurosis, which trickles down. People are afraid that they’re going to upset somebody on top, and so there’s a real sense of, I’ve got to be quiet, I don’t want to be fired. And there’s such a safety net around our show that we can make absolute jackasses of ourselves with impunity. I can honestly say that the show is made with love.

GQ: Tell me more about the humorist show you mentioned earlier.

Nick Offerman: People keep referring to me as a standup, and that just doesn’t sit well with me because a lot of my friends are standups and they’re brilliant at writing jokes, and I’m not. I learned as a young man that I don’t write jokes, but that I can deliver more mundane material and get a laugh. I call myself a humorist. I started doing a show—I wrote it to perform at colleges: It’s my ten tips for prosperity. And then I began playing at these big comedy festivals. Another person I really admire is Garrison Keillor, and I would love to aspire to his sort of genre. There’s an amazing venue in Los Angeles called Largo. The guy who runs it is this magnificent Irish proprietor named Flannigan. He is someone I really admire. He has the wherewithal to bring together the finest in American music—Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris and Jon Brion and others—and combine it with America’s greatest comedy. And it makes for such an interesting sort of goulash. I have been a huge fan of Largo for the fifteen years I’ve lived in L.A., and become a friend of Flannigan’s. So when I was putting together my show—which is called American Ham—I booked a couple of nights at Largo to make sure it worked. It ended up becoming a very popular show there; we’ve done about six of them so far. And to keep in the spirit of what Flannigan has been doing there, Megan opens for me, singing. I don’t if you’ve ever heard her sing, but she’s incredible. She and a young friend of ours, Stephanie Hunt—she played the bass player in Landry’s band on Friday Night Lights—formed a band. They call themselves Nancy and Beth, and the two of them are opening for me. And I’m almost embarrassed to take the stage after them because they weave such a beautiful feeling.

GQ: Can you sing?

Nick Offerman: I can. And I do five or six songs in my show. But no one will ever ask me to sing because it’s beautiful. My secret is hiding my musicianship behind humor. I never imagined that I would sing and play guitar for an audience. But at each show where I perform, Megan takes notes and coaches me. I think I’m approaching the level of intermediate, which I’m very excited about.

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